No offense but the internet gives you the most wrong and fucked up idea of helping people because people get mad if you don’t care about disasters happening in 72 countries, meanwhile the people in real life that are doing the most good picked one VERY SPECIFIC thing to care about and care about it REALLY HARD
Walks up to a guy working on restoring a native tree species to his downtown “why aren’t you posting about grasses in Turkmenistan!”
The internet has taken a whole generation of bright, motivated, passionate young people who care and have big hearts and turned them into paralyzed, shattered wrecks too crushed by the weight of the world’s pain to hand a pair of socks to a person in need
Also, the people who are doing the most good are—I cannot stress this enough—working to fix things that are PHYSICALLY CLOSE TO THEM
And as a Kentuckian this is exactly why i fucking hate the portrayal of small town and rural areas in the US as backward shitholes no one would want to live in because it’s not enough to recognize that good people live here.
You have to recognize that each and every small town MATTERS and if you invested your ENTIRE LIFE into this “shithole” rural place no one cares about it would MATTER.
people are trying to do the activism thing while being like “ugh i hate living here in this small town full of racists”
So….they’re not getting politically involved on a local level
They’re not paying attention to their local unhoused population—their NEIGHBORS, their OWN
They’re not paying attention to the creek downtown with pollution in it
They’re not helping the disabled lady across the street get to the store
They’re not writing letters to people in their local jail
They’re not finding people in THEIR OWN community who care about the same things they care about
They’re not contacting their OWN homeowner’s association
They’re not donating to organizations that are headquartered in cities and towns close by
And I know some people can’t do these things, and I know I come off as a hypocrite because I haven’t even been in my hometown very much lately, but I have done volunteer work and let me tell you.
When you physically are there to see the difference you make in the life of ONE person, it changes you. There is no room for despair or paralysis. You realize that simply helping in the way you can, in the amount you can, is SO INFINITELY worthwhile. It will change you forever as a person. Seriously
goddd i just want spider-man’s identity to be his own worst but new york city’s best kept secret. like i want him unthinkingly taking off his mask and like 20 people see, but if you ask them if they did? no they didn’t.
the rule is unwritten, but very enforced. like, there are online communities dedicated to erasing any trace of the spread of his identity. a tourist takes a photo of him and posts it online? it’s gone in minutes, and people send DMs to the poster anywhere from “hey, i’m sure you were just excited, but….” to “ill kill u if i evr c you, fuckin bitch”.
any information on spider-man is only spread via word of mouth, and only spoken in hushed, awed voices. after several years of spider-man, everyone knows someone who encountered him:
“he saved my cousin. caught a falling billboard from underneath with his bare hands…”
“wow… i’ve never seen him myself, but he talked to my coworker’s daughter for an hour after he stopped a guy from getting a little too handsy. apparently, his smile is ‘dreamy’.”
these secrets are freely given if you’re kind, trustworthy, and show respect for the little guy. but the moment you demand information on him… “i don’t know what you’re talking about, buddy. he’s just an urban legend the news likes to blame the city’s problems on so we don’t unionize or worse”
so as many times as spider-man ends up with out a mask, or accidentally introduces himself with a name that starts with 'p’ and rhymes with 'meter’… on the record, they don’t know a thing. because he does his best to help as many people as he can, so it’s only fair if they help him a little in return.
Every time I see a beautiful post about how Spidey collectively brings out the best I have to imagine the inverse of Venom just idiot disastering his way to the same result. His identity is so openly known that no one cares. Villains roll into to town prepared to “ruin his life” and just stop inside his apartment, looking around in horror, before turning to leave “I can’t do anything worse to this guy than life already did.”
“Venom saved everyone on the bus when it nearly went off a bridge, but he hung around for an hour caging spare change. He’s just going to buy tater tots.”
“My store was almost robbed but that weirdo ate the robber and now once a month he steals all the barbecue pork rinds.”
Someone comes into try and take Venom into jail but gets nowhere not because everyone is protecting him but because everyone just doesn’t want to know where he is. “Eddie? Ugh, I don’t know. I try to avoid him at every possible moment. Why don’t you fire up the tater tot signal that oughta bring them.”
I was talking to a kid in my daughter’s class today, and she said that she thought it would be fun to write a story about the Titanic, but with supernatural creatures.
So I said, “Yeah, that would great! What would the creatures do? Would they save the Titanic from sinking?”
And she gave me the most disgusted look. I have never seen a 9 year old face look so appalled.
“No,” she said, speaking very clearly so as to never be so grossly misunderstood again, “they’re going to eat the passengers.”
The teenager was asked to write a short scene or draw a short comic using a comedic trope from a list on a handout in their HS American Lit class. They chose to do the comic …
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